After over a decade of using Mac OS X, I am considering switching to Linux for my dev laptop. The tools I worry about are those that interact with audio and webcam - Go To Meeting, Google Hangout etc. My work involves me having to teleconf with others often.
Does anyone here have experience using Linux well in such scenarios. If so, what hardware are you using?
Also, does sleep-on-closing-lid work well?
Funny story: My new-ish Dell laptop (Inspiron 15 7559 i7 with 4k touchscreen display; which I got at an absurdly low sales price from the Dell outlet store) does not reliably recover from sleep under Windows, but does under Linux (neither worked when I first got the laptop, but now only Windows fails and now only some of the time). That's a first, for me, as I have had a huge variety of sleep related bugs in Linux over the years, but fewer under Windows.
Google Hangouts works fine under Chrome on Linux, but is quirkier under Firefox (I don't think I ever got the voice/video plugin working under Firefox, but I rarely use the video features these days, so I just run Chrome when I need it). Both video and audio Hangouts work fine under Chrome.
With very new hardware, you probably need a very new Linux distribution, and newer hardware can have installation quirks. Getting Linux onto my box took a lot of fiddling, but it now runs Fedora 24 quite nicely.
A couple of years back I was having persistent sleep/wake issues that seemed to stem from graphics driver issues. I switched between the open source and Nvidia binaries, trying to find a stable combination. What a nightmare. In the end, I decided that I didn't want to mess around and tried out a few Live CDs (think I tried Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora). In the end, Fedora worked out of the box and completed my "stress test" of sleep, wake, sleep, wake. I had to give up stellar 3D performance, but have found things to be working quite well and consistent now through all the Fedora updates.
Might give Elementary OS a spin. This old Thinkpad T510 is getting dated, but still solid as ever (besides battery life).
However, I have two devices with a Skylake processor and neither have on Linux (as of recently, there were some minor ones with bad power states on cores). One of them dualboots Windows, and windows has some random weird issues with Skylake and BSODs randomly (but rarely). Sometimes it "wakes up" into BSOD.
I'm still seeing powersaving issues even on Haswell. I believe basic support for Skylake only shipped in Ubuntu LTS only recently, too.
Basic "just run code" stuff seems to be working well enough, and on a desktop which always runs at max in my case it doesn’t need to support power savings modes either.
Linux is better for development, but worse for collaboration. You can get almost everything working, but it takes effort.
GotoMeeting screensharing tends to work, but not always. Join.me doesn't. The tools for Windows (my other OS) are much better if you need to capture screenshots or recordings often (typical use case: hotkey -> record part of the screen -> paste into Slack.. this is doable on Linux, but on Windows, it takes almost zero effort). The audio is getting better on Linux, but I have many audio devices (external DAC, audio-through-Displayport, analog headset, etc.), and switching between them quickly is more painful than how it is on Windows. This is aggravated by the fact that I hate all DEs (except maybe Gnome3), so I use i3 WM -- which is brilliant but stuff like clipboard management doesn't work well out of the box.
In general, Linux can work for my (your?) use case, but it's significantly worse than Windows. It's better for development though (in general). Currently I run Linux VMs under Windows, that works okay.
Ah, and Skype for Linux alpha works fine.
edit: this article mentioned MacOS and Linux and so that's all I thought OP's comment was referring to. We all know the advantages compared to Windows. Of course Windows is constantly improving.
Having a Windows VM on Linux seems workable albeit clunky for the ~5% of things that I must have like GoToMeeting, etc. Thing is I already use a Windows VM on Mac for some things like that because I am very security-conscious and OS-pollution-conscious and don't like installing intrusive stuff like GoToMeeting on my main OS.
Last time I tried (2+ years ago, it might be different now) Go To Meeting also wasn't working on Linux.
I've used Linux on the desktop between 2009-2014 and basically anything multimedia related was a chore.
Now just need a 'stop sharing my desktop' button.
Full disclaimer: I'm a friend of the founder, however I'm a paying customer due to the fact that
1. It's worked wonders with my clients and 2. It's so much better than hangouts or skype.
Compared to the big boys it may be considered a bit spartan but for what it does, it does it extraordinarily well.
I can tell you that for the most part it's worked flawlessly. The only issues I ever had were that linux rendering wasn't great, so sometimes the CPU was high just from rendering!
We are browser-only, so because we don't have a native app we just use browser functionality. The only thing we use the extensions for is for security to ask for permission to use the screen (it's really like a dozen lines of code).
Bluetooth is kind of a mess, on Xubuntu at least.
(Speaking as someone who likes Xfce, and is currently switching from MacOS to Linux and is mostly settled on Xubuntu), I think that's mostly an Xfce thing. GNOME (and therefore Unity, Budgie, possibly Cinnamon and maybe MATE) handle it better.
Sleep-on-lid-closing works reasonably well nowadays; I can't remember the last time I've run into a laptop which has issues on that front. However, I'd definitely do my research before buying a new laptop, especially if it's a very new one (in other words: you'll have better chances of power-management compatibility on laptops that are a bit more battle-tested).
I used to use Ubuntu and had Hangouts and GoToMeeting work just fine (also, Skype and Appear.in).
I switched to Mac for two reasons: browser testing Safari and quality hardware (aluminum case, retina screen, support for 3+ monitors, nice hinges). I suppose iOS app development is another reason you'd want it.
I don't have time to tinker with compiling kernels, configuring X11, figuring out which photo management software to use, setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it.
These are basics that will just work with OS X, very, very, reliably.
That said, if anyone can point me to a Linux distro (Debian/Ubuntu preferred) and hardware that actually work reliably together, please do.
In 2009 I installed Mandriva on a laptop--everything just worked. In 2011, I jumped ship to Mageia, the community-driven offshoot of Mandriva. Everything still just worked. Fast forward several laptops later, including mine and friends' and relations' laptops, and it all just works. Compiling a kernel? Wouldn't know how anymore. Fiddling with X11? No idea. I don't even have problems with Pulseaudio.
Compare that to dual booting this one with Windows 10. For several months, Windows 10 had a bug where it wouldn't save the touchpad settings. Every time, I'd have to disable tap-to-click. UGH. They finally fixed it, but what a pain.
(And when I had an OS X machine, received as part of payment for a job... between the beach ball and the not-infrequent crashes, where the screen dims and displays that fatal error message, it was a pain to get any work done.)
I haven't heard of the need for compiling kernels, configuring X11 etc. in a loong time.
> setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it
Again, works out of the box, just pick a laptop that is known to work well, i.e. a Clevo, Lenovo or some of the newer DELL machines to give Linux a proper chance - there's no point in trying a laptop that is known to work only with Windows and then complain about it - the same way you don't complain if macOS doesn't work well on a DELL.
You pick a specific machine to run macOS, do the same for Linux and everything will work beautifully out of the box.
If not, then I can vouch that my wife's Thinkpad runs Ubuntu with no issues. I concur with others that kernel compiling and X11 configuration have long been non-issues.
I use Fedora on a ThinkPad X230. It works an absolute dream. GNOME is my favorite of all the desktops, and Fedora by default ships a fully setup and functioning Gnome on Wayland session (which will also be the default session in the next release, coming in a few weeks).
The reason I chose to run Fedora on a ThinkPad is because it required no tweaking and fiddling at all to get working nicely. I'm all about that seamless out-of-the-box experience.
I was amused by the post here today about the Touch ID fork of sudo for macOS, because I already use the same feature on my ThinkPad every day, and it required absolutely no configuration or setup (other than enrolling my fingerprint).
Since you are asking for specifics, I run openSUSE Tumbleweed on an Asus Zenbook UX 305, and with the exception of keyboard backlight, all the builtin hardware works as expected. I have never tried to attach an external display. I did not try Ubuntu on this machine, the Debian installer pretty much bailed on me. (Tumbleweed is a rolling release distro, so the amount of updates it receives can be slightly annoying at times, OTOH the software is very much up to date.) I have to admit I have not tried suspending the machine by closing the lid, but Fn+F1 works reliably.
That's fine, you are paying a premium for all this, it better "just" works. Elementary OS is free of charge.
hangouts works brilliantly. skype (even the old version) works great with both audio and video. in fact i have switched over to the skype web version which works on the chrome browser (no video call for now.. but audio works brilliantly).
i use fedora 24..which just works and is pretty cutting edge. i switched over from Ubuntu pretty recently and have been very happy.
im on a xps 13. previously i was on a thinkpad. there is no dearth of cool laptops on Linux.
plus it comes with all the new systemd security integration. i dont think cinnamon has been rebased on gnome 3 yet
su -c 'dnf install http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm'
sudo dnf -y install cabextract lzip p7zip p7zip-plugins unrar gstreamer1-libav gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld gstreamer1-plugins-base gstreamer1-plugins-good gstreamer1-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-bad-free gstreamer-plugins-bad-nonfree gstreamer-plugins-base gstreamer-plugins-espeak gstreamer-plugins-fc gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-rtsp amrnb amrwb faac faad2 flac lame libdca libmad libmatroska x264 x265 xvidcore hexchat mpv smplayer vlcSleep-on-closing-lid has worked fine for me for many years.
It's funny that, with regards to Just Working after installation, Linux seems to be way ahead of Windows. I installed both of them on my laptop and while on Linux everything worked fine from the start without needing extra setup steps (including the multitouch trackpad; the not-so-standard function keys like keyboard brightness; even the this weird external subwoofer that came with the laptop), on Windows i had to download and install special drivers for all those things, and even for much more basic stuff, like the wireless card (had to dig through old computer stuff to find an ethernet cable to connect to the internet).
Now, i understand why this is the case. Linux distros are designed to be installed by their users, while Windows is designed to come pre-installed on computers. But i still find it curious how Linux is much more non-tech-savvy-friendly in this particular regard.
WebEx's Linux support is excellent though.
Google Hangouts works fine under chrome on linux.
As far as hardware, webcam support is generally good. It's now at the point where if you bought a random webcam, there is a better than 50% chance it will just work. That being said, it's much safer to check if others have used it, or to just buy a laptop that has a webcam and ships with linux support (Both Dell and HP have laptops that ship with linux installed). I have a Creative Labs USB webcam that unfortunately has no model number printed on it (I have a long list of things I don't like about built-in webcams).
Sleep has worked on all laptops I've tried in the past decade or so. Hibernate (i.e. suspend to disk) is much more spotty.
Battery life lies somewhere between windows 7 and Mac, though certain applications are particularly bad at draining the battery (powertop can be useful in identifying these).
In general linux on a laptop has gotten way better; in particular networking is much more bearable now that NetworkManager actually works and it's much easier to find laptops with linux supported wifi gear preinstalled.
[edit]
I saw someone mention audio issues; that reminds me. The situation there is more like what networking was like 5-6 years ago. Pulse Audio promises to provide all the basic features people expect from an audio stack), but sometimes crashes, or drains your battery or just causes weird sounds to come out of your speaker. On the other hand, getting ALSA+dmix setup correctly without pulse audio (which is the only real alternative), is fairly arcane, and leaves you without things like per-application volume control (though many linux applications provide their own software-implemented volume control).
That I think would be the best of both worlds for me.
In particular:
1. The graphic card (Intel onboard Crystal Eye) switches to low-power mode on battery. The windows Intel driver has an option to switch it to performance mode. No such option on the linux drivers.
2. The damn Xf86Display Key (Projector shortcut) isn't supported.
However, I've realized over time that irrespective of your choice, you will face issues on _your device_. NTFS would stop working on your Mac, or your iPhone will refuse to connect to your Car's bluetooth one fine day.
(/rant)
webcam both on the mbp and my logitech hd work out of the box. sleep on closing lid also works quite well -- and i feel waking it up is faster.
which kernel were you installing?
For some reason I had to install "cheese" to make it work. But that's all. No extra drivers needed or anything else.